


knot

by toujours_nigel



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Collars, M/M, Pre-Slash, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:21:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27024970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: "Kneel," James says, and helps him down when he stumbles, wand out and ready.
Relationships: Sirius Black & James Potter, Sirius Black/James Potter
Comments: 4
Kudos: 33





	knot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whitmans_kiss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitmans_kiss/gifts), [acesandapricots](https://archiveofourown.org/users/acesandapricots/gifts).



The band is leather, subtler than he would have thought possible considering the source, adjustable: a piece of kindness he is unlikely to utilise. Sirius has a thicker neck if narrower shoulders fully transformed, and a looser collar will be easier anyway to tuck into his underrobe. The buckle on the back is inscribed  _ if found return to _ with James' name and his parents' address on the second and third lines, filling up the little brass round, smaller than a Sickle. A very small thing, to flood Sirius' heart and his eyes when nothing in this very long summer, very brutal spring, have moved him. He glares at James, almost hoping to be mocked just so he can start one of their endless laughing fights, but James is looking back at him soft-mouthed and sloe-eyed.

"I thought," James starts, but Sirius cannot bear to know what James has thought beyond this proof of belonging, and waves him quiet.

"Put it on me," he says instead, and turns, tugging his braided hair over one shoulder and ducking his head a little like his mother does while waiting for his father to clasp strings of pearl and agate around her neck. There is a photograph of them in that pose, turning their heads to look at the camera. Sirius has his mother’s smile and his mother’s hands and his mother’s temper, quick-rising and long-running. He stands very still for the leash, straining-still, an eager waiting like full-moon nights, all the exciting dangers of the forest bristling into James’ study on the third floor of his parents’ London home.

James’ footsteps are whisper-quiet, even over the bare stone of the floor, cold under Sirius’ bare feet with summer incardining into autumn. James is velvet-shod, a master of sneaking-up-on, the executor of all their quieter pranks. His knuckles rapping the desk at Sirius’ elbow, therefore, is a generous warning, though Sirius could track him a mile by his breath, through the city by the way blood beats in his throat, at his wrist. James is the generous sort, at least where his friends are concerned; overly generous, disdaining to count the cost.

His hands are cold on the flushed skin of Sirius’ throat, first through the loose weave of his underrobe, then shoving at the collar of it, slipping underneath to unfasten the ribboned closures at the shoulders, backhanded and blind. Sirius is a handspan taller just now, but James is gaining fast; their fathers are of about a height, James’ mother taller than Walburga Black in stockinged feet.

“There,” James says when Sirius’ robe is gaping open a palmwidth beneath his clavicle and about the same at the back. “Tell me if it’s tight.”

The leather goes on rasping, rough like James’ calluses, soft like James’ palm clasped on the bared skin at the conjunction of shoulder and neck. Sirius tilts his head back, offering his throat to its grip.

“Hold still,” James grouses, “this is tricky.” He boxes Sirius in against the desk, knees tucked in between Sirius’ and one elbow digging into the meat of his back underneath the swing of his wingbone. His underrobe is cotton in deference to the fading summer, his overrobe doffed in deference to the informality of the Potter household; the buttoned cuff of James’ sleeve rests cold against the curve of his shoulder sloping up into his neck.

The collar resists and evades James’ attempts to manage it, the band slipping to hang awkwardly down Sirius’ shoulder, one end trailing into the puddled-open collar of his underrobe. James huffs an exhausted laugh into the back of his neck, and lays his forehead against Sirius’ shoulder. It has been a hard summer for James as well, an overlong spring, anxiously managing his friends, parents, the thundercloud suffocation of the Blacks in full outrage.

“I’ve got it,” Sirius tells him, fishing the strap up, passing it around his throat and back into James’ reach. “Tie me up.”

James laughs again, straightening, busses a kiss into Sirius’ hair as he takes hold of both ends of the collar and tugs it into place. He slides the buckle home with Sirius’ fingers pressing the strap into skin, and tugs on the collar again, sharper, jolting it against his pharyngeal arches. “I’ve been thinking about it. You can’t be trusted out on your own, Padfoot.”

Sirius swallows hard against the constraint even as it loosens to rest at the base of his throat. “Have I been a bad dog?”

He has a certain dread of the idea that he has taken on with his shorter limbs and sharpened senses. Sirius Black lives to flout convention and infuriate authority. Padfoot wants to wag his tail and be told he’s good.

James sighs and pats him on the side. “No. Just half-trained and turned loose. I’ve been a bad master.”

This time James flinches first, his body a sharp interruption in the dead air, the warmth flooding Sirius’ belly and blood. He gropes back for James’ hand, withdrawing, and drags it into place on his hip, James’ arm crossing his torso, James’ body stuttering forward to rest against his, chin to shoulder and shod toe to bare heel.

“I don’t mind,” Sirius says when James neither fights his hold nor scoffs at him. “I  _ don’t _ . Master me. I’ll come to heel. I’ll be your dog.”

James shudders once, hand clenching into the cloth at Sirius’ hip, and says, “Put your fingers under the collar, see how many you can fit without constricting breathing. I fastened it as loosely as I could.”

Four, as it happens, counting them out while James breathes into his shoulder. All four fingers, tucked between leather and skin, knuckles hard against his clavicle. Not his thumb. His breath hitches when he tries.

“Don’t,” James grits out and then pauses, gathering himself in a way that has grown familiar these six months, a way Sirius hates. “Alright. You can’t transform right now, obviously, but that should do, even thick-necked as you are.”

“I’m a boar-hound,” Sirius answers, affecting dignity. He is, of course, no such thing, being instead a Crup or the Grim or some other canine monster of British myth. It is unfair, when James is evidently a royal hart and Peter a grey rat, but Sirius, unconcerned with specificities, had poured his whole heart into  _ dog _ and  _ big _ .

But it makes James snort with laughter, which answers for almost everything. “Of course you are,” he says, and this time Sirius doesn’t stop him when he withdraws his hand, puts some distance between them. “Can you hide it, around other people? We can play it off if we need.”

The idea of lying about this is worse than the horror of James discovering what the collar means to Sirius, bad enough to turn him around, if not quite enough to make him meet and return James’ gaze.

“No,” he informs James’ determined chin. “We’ll tuck it away. It can be our secret.”

“A Marauder secret,” James agrees, as though that had been what Sirius meant. “Show us, then.”

Sirius’ hands are steady as he does up the fastenings of his underrobe, if a little slow. He habitually unfastens only the top closure on each side, and the ribbons on the third and fourth are particularly marked with disuse, the loops still half sewn together. Between third and second, the collar disappears under his robe, tucked as neatly as Padfoot’s too-honest tail.

When he dares a glance up, James is staring at the unmarked grey of his torso, frowning, shuffling his weight from foot to foot. James fidgeting is a bad sign, trouble impending, and Sirius pauses with his hand on the top closure to the left, respondingly wary. “What is it?”

“There’s.” James stops, swallows a dry, clicking hesitation and says, “It has to be sealed shut, to prevent the possibility of an expensive pet being stolen, see, young sir, you won’t believe the cost of a pedigreed Crup these days, or maybe you would, hehe Mr. Potter, eh? Time was, your uncle Harold, he had a full kennel, such good creatures, my brother had the raising of them, pity your father didn’t keep up with it after, well I’m sure…”

Sirius claps a hand over his mouth, the other around the back of his head, holding him silent and in place. After three breaths, James nods, and Sirius nods back but doesn’t let go. Once, when they were eight or nine, James had recited, word-perfect, the rant his Aunt Drusilla had delivered to their mothers about straying husbands. It had amused nobody, and Bellatrix had taken it out of their skins later, but James had only been nervously excited, about his father coming home after a year in Chinon: happy, and afraid of being happy.

“I won’t do it myself,” Sirius tells him. “What would be the point? I’m not actually a Crup, I won’t get stolen. But if you want it, I’ll let you master me. I’ll be your dog.”

He loosens his grip while James is drawing breath into a gasp, steps away till his hip hits the desk, waits. He wants very little as badly as he wants to leave the room, but that little keeps him rooted, toes curling against the cold floor, ears straining to catch the whisper of James’ approaching feet.

“Kneel,” James says, low and intent, and helps him down when he stumbles, hand resting briefly on his shoulder before moving to loop his braided hair around his left hand, wand out and steady in his right.


End file.
